Political Wisdom: Lessons From Florida

With Mitt Romney’sbig win in Florida, attention is turning to Nevada where voters hold their nominating caucuses on Saturday. But the campaigns have something to learn from results in the Sunshine State.

At the National Journal, Ron Fournier says Florida may have established Mr. Romney as the “alpha dog” in the GOP presidential race. But his victory has “li-Mitts.”

After five weeks of primary and caucus fights, what did voters learn about Romney? On the plus side, he has a successful record as governor of Massachusetts, head of the 2002 Olympic committee, and cofounder of Bain Capital. His stump speech contains a hint of what could be the antidote to President Obama’s reelection. “The president’s a nice guy, and I know he’s trying,” Romney says, “but he doesn’t understand how the economy works.”

Now, stack that against what else voters have heard about Romney: He’s a liar and a flip-flopper who will say anything to get elected. He’s filthy rich. He likes to fire people. He made his fortune plundering companies and laying off workers. Oh, and don’t forget that he buried assets in the Cayman Islands and won’t cough up his tax returns.

Some of these perceptions come courtesy of his fellow Republicans. Others are self-inflicted.

One stark fact of the campaign that emerged in Florida is that Romney can go more negative with less damage to himself than Gingrich can. The speaker’s advisers know there is an underlying theme to the race, and that theme is best described in a question: Where’s Angry Newt? Every time Gingrich, provoked by a Romney ad, made an angry speech, as he did in Mount Dora, the answer he gave showed voters exactly where Angry Newt was.

Romney, in the persona he presents to voters, doesn’t have that subtext of anger. Still, the constant negative attacks took their toll on Romney himself, as well as Gingrich. Romney’s approval rating among independent voters nationwide has declined significantly in recent weeks, nearly all of it as a result of his battle with Gingrich. Romney advisers point out that he only went 100 percent negative for one week, but know they have to get the battle over with — to kill Gingrich’s candidacy — before Romney does lasting damage to himself.

At the New York Times, Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker write Mr. Romney may have decisively won Florida but he also may have left a perception that his campaign “has become locked in a bitter – and counterproductive – war of words” with Mr. Gingrich.

And the very trait that propelled him in Florida — a willingness to descend into the muck and run a relentlessly negative campaign — distracted from his economic-themed argument against Mr. Obama while deepening his rift with some populist conservatives. Should Mr. Gingrich remain a viable enough candidate to stay in the race through the summer, as he vowed on Tuesday, Mr. Romney could be forced to maintain an angry edge that could undermine his appeal among moderate and independent voters — groups whose views of him, polls suggest, appear to have been harmed by the Florida melee.

Tim Padgett at Time Magazine’s Swampland says that if Mr. Romney wins the nomination, he must understand the “mood swings” of Floridians, particularly the Latino voters, because Florida is the biggest swing state.

Romney shouldn’t linger at his Florida fiesta. If there’s one area where Florida’s bellwether looks can be deceiving, it’s the Latino vote. GOP candidates who win here tend to delude themselves into thinking they’ve locked in the burgeoning U.S. Latino electorate just because they heard ardent applause from Cuban Americans in Miami. But it’s been six years since there were more registered Latino Republicans in Florida than registered Latino Democrats — and the latter today outnumber the former by more than 100,000.

That’s only half the story. The Cubans and Puerto Ricans who make up most of Florida’s Latino population are vastly overshadowed nationally by Mexican Americans, who make up two-thirds of the U.S. Latino community — and who care as ardently about immigration, where they see Romney as an antagonist, as Cubans do about Castro. There is no such thing as one “Latino identity” in that regard. But if Romney and the GOP have learned anything in Florida — where they’ll return in August for the GOP national convention in Tampa — it’s that political identity these days can be as elusive as a Burmese python.

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